Internet coming into its own as tool for global education

IT began as a tool to connect the academic world and the defence community using the emerging computer technologies that were becoming popular several decades ago.

Now, as it moves toward being every person's means of communicating with everyone else, it is also emerging as a highly creative medium. And the Internet is coming into its own as an independent forum for education itself.

Earlier this year, the Usenet University-Global Network Academy (UU-GNA) won several awards on the World Wide Web (WWW), firmly establishing it as one of the most creative endeavours on the Internet. Among its numerous prizes were the winner of the 'Best of the WWW' competition and 'Best Educational Service'.

UU-GNA represents a free-form coming together of people and resources all over the Internet to form a loosely-knit consortium of numerous semi-autonomous and several autonomous affiliates with the academy acting as an 'umbrella', essentially bundling educational initiatives on the Internet.

The history of the UU-GNA extends back more than two years when it established a long-term goal to develop a fully-accredited university operating entirely on the Net.

This has come to be broken down into several components, some of which exist and others which are still being developed.

The UU-GNA Meta-Library represents a launching point to numerous meta-resources (on-line documents) which have been registered with the library. Through this forum, lecture notes, terms papers and other educational materials are made available to the Internet to be used as education resources.